Mic Wright is a journalist specialising in technology, music and popular culture. He lives in Dublin.

PornIQ is the most addictive pornography site ever built. This is going to ruin relationships

Like an experiment where pigs are encouraged to use their noses to activate a food dispenser, PornIQ is the most deviously addictive and manipulative porn site ever built. As the easily pressed button serves up a tasty treat to the lab animals, so this site delivers tailored filth to its feverish fans in four button presses or fewer. This is super-curated porn. It's the future of filth and it's going to lead to ruined relationships.

PornIQ is built on top of PornMD: an incredibly user-friendly porn search engine that already pulls together clips from many of the most popular tube sites. Tube sites are porn emporia where many different producers upload free clips to encourage people to head to their full-length paid material or stump up cash for a live show.

On their first visit to the site, users are greeted with a row of big black buttons with white outline icons rendered on them. Choose, for instance, MILF – if you don't know what this means, you'll have to google to find out – and you’ll then be shown more buttons to refine your choice (in this case “orgies”, “lesbian MILFs”, “MILFs teach teens” and “More MILF clips”). The final option after every selection is how long you have to watch. That’s the twisted genius of PornIQ: it almost automates the process of searching for your particular peccadillo and takes into account your limited schedule or leisurely plans.

The truly maniacal magic is what is happening in the back end of the website – and yes, I know that sounds like a crude euphemism. Every time users click on those big buttons and narrow down to a particular playlist of curated porn clips, the owners of PornIQ are increasing the sophistication of their database and learning more and more about what turns you on.

In the world of online dating, Tinder has shown the huge benefit of radically simplifying the user interface of your service. It plays to the user ego; it makes them feel like VIPs with only a few minutes to spare even in their quest to find love or at least get their leg over. PornIQ applies the same principle to the less socially acceptable aspects of our sexuality.

In quickly allowing porn surfers to drill down to the specific type of porn they like and making PornIQ almost like a game, its creators have made an incredibly potent site. As grim as that sounds, it simply means that the average visitor to PornIQ will visit more often and stay there longer, grabbing their favourite clips and clicking on ads. A recent post by Eat24, a food delivery startup, proved that porn viewers are actually more likely to click advertising than regular surfers.

Every website owner, whether they’re touting pornography or running an online retailer, craves a high time on-site figure. The kings and queens of pushing that figure up are Facebook who know how to make users click like monomaniacal monkeys. PornIQ just extends that principle to the MuckyWeb.

In recent years, every industry has learned to harness the pathology of the addict to their advantage. Porn producers, as with gambling bosses, have always been masters of that. That said, PornIQ is the most naked – yeah, yeah – example of that strategy that I have ever seen.

In his book The Fix, my colleague Damian Thompson writes: “Digital porn is the equivalent of cheap gin in Georgian England: it provides a reliable, dirty hit that relieves misery and boredom.” Well, the distillation process for that dirt just got more efficient. The sex addicts of Britain should despair; PornIQ is to traditional porn sites what crack is to cocaine.